Working hard to stay drug-free, raise family

Sunday

Aug 14, 2011 at 3:15 AM

By Mary Pat Rowland

I met someone who inspired me and asked if it would be OK to tell his story.

His name is Michael. He is 33 years old and proud to say he is part Mexican, part Indian (either Apache or Cherokee) and part white. He came to New Hampshire from California. I ran across him through a business connection. Michael and I agreed not to use his last name. He is proud of himself and his story, but has children and wants to protect them. There are parts of his past that are not pretty.

The first thing I noticed about Michael is that he seems happy. He's generally in a good mood, always upbeat.

The second thing I noticed about him is he works all the time. He works several jobs, including a position making deliveries with his wife of four years. It's a grueling schedule. Altogether, when he tallied up his time, he told me he works seven days a week, about 74 hours all year long.

How did Michael end up in New Hampshire so far from his family? It was because of a woman. He met her in California and they had a boy together. They came to New Hampshire because she had family here and had another son. They got married and that's when Michael says everything started to go bad.

It wasn't marriage that turned their lives sour; it was drugs. Michael had a good factory job where he was making a lot of money, but he lost it because he was doing meth and couldn't pass the drug test. He was smoking and snorting it. "I never put a needle in my arm," Michael said, "but it was still bad, really bad." He had started his drug habits around 12 years old.

Michael's wife was doing drugs, too. She was doing meth and smoking weed. When Michael lost his good job, he, his wife and two children ended up in a local homeless shelter. They were addicts with a couple of young kids and had lost control of their lives.

Michael's parents wanted him to come home and straighten out, so they sent plane tickets and the family moved back to California. It didn't fix things. Michael's wife wasn't there for her children. She was into the drug life.

Michael and his boys went on without her. They moved to her grandmother's and stayed there eight or nine months. He looked for work, but was still getting high. He landed a pretty decent job and started working, but his drug test came back dirty so they let him go.

He and the boys moved back in with his parents, but it wasn't helping. Michael felt he needed to start fresh and moved back to New Hampshire to take care of his kids. His wife, still living the drug life, did not come with him.

He and his boys moved to the homeless shelter in Rochester for four to five months and when it closed for the summer he moved to My Friends Place in Dover until he got on his feet and was able to get an apartment on Lafayette Street in Rochester. The shelter had given him a car, too -- a Crown Victoria.

Though things were better, one aspect of his life hadn't changed -- he was still doing drugs.

He met a woman from Sanford, Maine, had a daughter with her and continued to use. While he was with the woman from Sanford, there was another woman he became friendly with. They grew closer and closer. She had a boy. He had two, plus a baby daughter. They moved in together and that's when he got clean for good. "I stopped all drugs. She stopped, too," Michael said. She had been addicted to crack and heroin, but was lucky enough to be enrolled in the Strafford County Drug Court. It's a tough program for offenders that keeps them out of jail, but requires frequent drug testing and monitoring.

Both drug free, they got married and had a daughter together. Altogether, they have five children: his two boys with his first wife; his wife's son from a previous relationship; his daughter with the woman from Sanford (the girl lives with them every weekend); and their daughter together.

"Our kids are our lives," Michael says. "I got clean because I wanted to take care of my kids. When you do drugs you end up having nothing. When you're on drugs, drugs are everything. You sell everything you have. You'd do anything to get more drugs." His life is not perfect now. The state stepped in recently because Michael and his family were living in unsafe housing with exposed wiring. So he and his wife are moving the kids to a nicer place in Somersworth.

His first wife, still living the drug life in California, has nothing to do with his two boys, which is very painful for his oldest son who wonders why his mother doesn't want him.

But Michael still feels optimistic. He has his wife, his kids, a place to live and two decent cars. When he was doing drugs, he had nothing and easily could have lost all of his children.

There are thousands and thousands of parents who can't or won't raise their children, mostly because of drug addiction. Their kids end up in foster care or on the streets until they grow up and repeat the cycle.

So, it is gratifying to hear the story of one family that is trying to make it. Michael and his wife have beaten the odds. They are drug free, raising their kids and paying their bills as best they can.

I'm rooting for them and I thought you should know.

Mary Pat Rowland is the managing editor of Foster's. Her e-mail address is mprowland@fosters.com.